Earlier today, I wrote about the latest iteration of CoCounsel, the AI product originally developed by Casetext before it was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2023 for a whopping $650 million in cash. But well before Casetext was acquired, and well before it introduced CoCounsel as one of the very first legal AI assistants to […]
Earlier today, I wrote about the latest iteration of CoCounsel, the AI product originally developed by Casetext before it was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2023 for a whopping $650 million in cash. But well before Casetext was acquired, and well before it introduced CoCounsel as one of the very first legal AI assistants to use OpenAI’s GPT large language model, Casetext had already established itself as an innovator in legal research, including with its 2020 launch of Parallel Search, which used neural net technology to find cases based on concepts, even when those cases contained none of the search terms.
Nowadays, when it comes to innovation in legal research by a legal tech startup, there is a strong argument to be made that Midpage is picking up the mantle from where Casetext left off. As I noted about Midpage in a post in February, the startup is making clever use of AI to provide legal research features that allow users to quickly analyze and narrow search results across multiple dimensions — features that, in some cases, I have never before seen on a legal research platform.
And now today, as it continues to develop and innovate, Midpage — which was a finalist in the Startup Alley competition I run at ABA Techshow — is making two notable announcements.
One is that it has raised $4 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round, bringing its total raise to $6.2 million. It is being somewhat mysterious about the sources of the funding, saying only that the round was led by a “legal publishing house” and included participation by a chief innovation officer from one of the Am Law top 30 firms and from its prior investor LEA Partners.
The other notable announcement is its launch today of Proposition Search, which company founder and CEO Otto Zastrow explicitly positions as the heir apparent to Casetext’s Parallel Search — only better, he says, in that it solves what he saw as a weakness of the Casetext product.
“Proposition Search on Midpage.ai picks up where Parallel Search left off,” Zastrow writes in a blog post today. “Like with Parallel Search, you can search by typing in a proposition you want support for.”
While Zastrow praised Casetext’s Parallel Search as ahead of its time, he says that a shortcoming was its imprecision. In the best-case scenario, it would return a list of relevant cases, but you were still left to sift through them to find the best case to cite for a proposition. In the worst-case scenario, the search would focus on the wrong aspects of your query and force to iterate on your query several times over.
Midpage’s Proposition Search addresses this weakness through its Add Column feature, which — as I described in my post about Midpage in February — allows you to refine results by asking questions against search results and seeing the responses displayed in separate columns to the right of the original results.
Now in Midpage, when a user selects Proposition Search instead of Keyword Search, it automatically adds a second column for Proposition Search that shows the cases the most directly support the proposition the user is seeking to support. If need be, the user could continue to add columns to further refine the results by specific facts or legal issues.
In an example Zastrow uses in his blog post, he searches for support for the proposition, “Faithless servant doctrine requires showing of repeated disloyal acts.” He enters that statement and selects Proposition Search (instead of Keyword Search), and gets both the standard list of results in the first column and the Proposition Search results in the second column.
Zastrow says this feature is not a replacement for keyword searching, but rather is best used when seeking cases that support a specific proposition of law.
“We’re committed to building the best experience for hardcore legal researchers who leave no stone unturned,” Zastrow writes in his blog post. “We hope this is a step in the right direction.”
